Hi folks, second week of sculpture now and everyone's been hard at work. There's some really impressive stuff in the studio. As I mentioned in my last post I'd started working on twisting steel flat bars. I kind of hit a brick wall after that though as I couldn't figure out a way of joining them, other than welding, so I put them to one side - temporarily.

I then started thinking about some sort of twisting mechanism, as a sculpture. So I prepared some wire, cutting to lenghts and straightening. Then I had some parts made in MDF, which I painted with aluminium wood primer. That took several days to dry (a lesson learned). When it was all finally assembled I was surprised to discover that it actually worked as I'd intended. By rotating the handles on the circular plates in opposite directions, the wire strands twisted together. But is it art? Is it sculpture? I'm happy with the result so I guess that's the main thing. Hope you get the idea from the images.

A few other things I've been working on this week include altering the texture of the steel flat bar I was using previously. As you can see in the images I tried disguising the steel with fibres, to give it a soft texture as opposed to the hardness of bare steel. Ideally something more substantial than a single bar could be completely covered in soft fibres to possibly intrigue or surprise the viewer.

I also returned to the twisted steel bars I'd been working with. I figured that as I couldn't join them by welding I'd try joining them with string. This would also incorporate the soft texture I'd tried against the steel earlier. I was just basically trying to come up with a random shape  to see where it would lead.

In the last image you can see I wound some string around part of the steel just to see what effect it would give. The loose bits of string were deliberate - for the same reason. So I'm thinking of maybe trying other materials on other parts of the steel by way of experimenting. Just have to see where it goes.